MikeDiDonato.comhttps://www.mikedidonato.com
my corner of nowhere particularWed, 03 Jun 2020 14:38:23 +0000en-US
hourly
1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1Time Controlshttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/06/03/time-controls/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/06/03/time-controls/#respondWed, 03 Jun 2020 14:07:23 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11284The stereotypical chess game is a crazy long drawn out affair where intense people sit across from each other and stare at a board for hours on end, occasionally reaching forward to move a pawn. Most people find this intimidating and… well… boring.

Enter the clock.

Time restrictions can make chess extremely exciting. The purpose of this post is to explain common types of chess games as they relate to time.

Fast Chess

Ignoring the long variant for now, fast chess games are often lumped under three terms:

Rapid chessGames that last somewhere between 10 and 60min

Blitz chessGames that last between 5 and 10min

Bullet chessGames shorter than 5 minutes

You may have seen a chess clock before. It has two clock faces and two buttons. The way it works is simple: when player 1 makes his move he hits the button. This action stops his time from ticking down and starts his opponent’s clock. When his opponent finishes her move and hits her button, player 1’s clock starts to tick down again. The two clocks never run simultaneously.

With time controls like this there are two ways to lose: by checkmate, or if your clock runs out of time. So HURRY UP.

This structure is often referred to as Sudden Death (SD).

Consider a one minute bullet SD chess game: each player has a total of one minute for all their collective moves. That means the longest the game could possibly last is two minutes. The result? ADRENALIN. Oh, and also horrific chess practices.

Skilled chess artisans seem to advise that learners not get too excited by Bullet or Blitz chess*. When the clocks are flirting with zero, sometimes you can win a game by playing any move faster than your opponent even if it’s a terrible terrible move. This reward system results in messy chaotic chess behaviors where speed can be prioritized over skill.

That said, it is REALLY fun. It’s exciting and thrilling and will get you pumped to play play play. So for all the nay-sayers, there is an emotional value to fast chess and it most certainly helps generate interest in the sport.

With the invention of the digital chess clock, people started refining time restrictions to prevent games from entering sloppy conclusions. Famous American Grand Master Bobby Fischer proposed one of the most commonly used methods: start the clock with a set time, then add additional time after each move.

This incremental style of chess is notated like this:

15 | 10

This means each player has 15 MINUTES on their clock at the beginning of the game but after each move, 10 SECONDS are added to their time. Thus even if your clock falls precipitously in the first part of a game, you can be sure you’ll always have a minimum of 10 seconds to make a decision. This is called Increment Timing or Fischer Timing.

One bizarre side effect of this design is that by moving quickly a player could ADD time to their clock. In a 15 minute game if a player makes the first 6 moves nearly instantly (executing, say, a prescribed well-documented opening) then they’d have 16 minutes left on their clock. This could yield them an advantage later in the game. Alternate timing methods avoid this pitfall:

Bronstein delay: You still get extra time added to the clock after each move, but it will never add more time than you had at the start of your turn. So if you’ve got 25 seconds left, and you only take 1 second to make a move, the Bronstein clock will only add 1 second back onto your clock bringing it back to 25 seconds.

Simple delay: You get extra time per move at the START of each turn. But instead of adding the time onto the clock, the clock doesn’t start ticking down until the extra time has gone by. So if you have a 10 second ‘add’ then your game clock won’t start ticking down until 10 seconds have passed.

Classical Chess

Now let’s circle back to the long form chess referred to as Classical Chess. Games of this variety often combine different timing structures over the course of a game. Here is, for example, the FIDE regulations for the World Championship of Chess:

The time control for each game is 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 60 minutes for the next 20 moves, and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game with an increment of 30 seconds per move starting from move 61.

This type of time control is common for tournaments and has its roots as one of the first methods of controlling time in chess. By offering banks of time for each set of moves, games could be kept on pace. Early chess masters agreed that letting someone take hours upon hours for a single move wasn’t making the game any more fun for players or for spectators. On top of that, tournaments would drag on FOREVER. Even the World Championship of Chess time controls are lengthy compared to a normal mortal human tournament. Most of those operate within the 30 minute time frame so that a tournament can be completed in a single night.

Lastly, it’s worth noting how much time control has changed and that it will likely continue to change. With the use of computers to aid performance, Classical Chess between the chess super-grand masters seem to be headed towards a pattern of draws, draws, and more draws. The 2018 World Chess Championship had 12 consecutive draws between Magnus Carlson and Fabiano Caruna. Carlson famously opted for an early draw in game 12 to intentionally enter into the rapid tiebreaker portion of the contest where he won handily. It will be fascinating to witness how the chess world adapts as we head down this path.

*From what I’ve learned, most chess powerhouses recommend the 15|10 game format as the shortest game to play if you’re trying to improve your chess critical thinking.

In that 2018 World Champion Chess Tournament if the draws kept going past the Classical Chess and through Rapid chess, the competitors would then play blitz. If the blitz games were still a draw then they would play a very unique time variant:

Armageddon. In Armageddon white has 5 minutes on the clock but black only has 4 minutes. Both players may get an increment (like 3 seconds per move after the 61st as was the case in 2018). But if the game falls to a draw, black is declared the winner because they had less time at the start. How clever!

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/06/03/time-controls/feed/0Sleep Consultationhttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/27/sleep-consultation/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/27/sleep-consultation/#respondWed, 27 May 2020 16:47:29 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11475Two weeks ago I had my initial sleep consult, with a follow up happening the following Monday. My hope was to be recommended for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) and I’m pleased to report that this turned out to be the prescribed path.

CBT-I is sleep training for adults. If you have enjoyed life as a new parent, you likely spent money on books explaining how to train your kid to sleep better by employing tricks like: maintain a strict sleeping schedule for the baby, don’t feed immediately before setting to bed, wake them up with lights and excitement to encourage them into the day, etc. There are so many books because the tricks tend to help. It’s pretty logical that the same would work for adults. Aside: I find it amusing that we are generally poor at enforcing good sleep practices for ourselves.

My first meeting with the sleep clinic went as expected. The doctor asked basic questions like:

What time do you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning?

Do you drink caffeine, and if so when?

What does your insomnia look like?

Did the origins of your sleeping problems coincide with any sort of life event like a physical trauma or an illness?

The general purpose of these questions was to get a basic understanding of my lifestyle and to see if there might be a medical reason I was having problems. After 15 minutes of questions, the doctor pointed me towards a Psychologist for CBT-I. Woo!

Scene II: The second doctor televisit

My second visit was a more lengthy one. I met with the doctor and went into a far more detailed series of questions that related to my day to day sleep schedule and how I dealt with sleep related issues. Questions like:

When you wake up at night, what do you do?

Do you ever snack in the middle of the night?

What time do you eat dinner?

Do you ever nap to recover your sleep?

Have you ever fallen asleep or found yourself nodding off at the wheel?

It was an exciting line of questions. They said I was doing a lot of things right, but the biggest area that I could improve on was my wake up time.

I used to set two alarms: one for 5 am and another for 6:20. If it was a good night sleep, I’d get up early and exercise etc. But, if I was awake suffering from insomnia from, say, 1am til 4am, I’d turn off that early alarm and skip the exercise that day. Same thing with weekends: no need to get up at 5, if I don’t have work.

“Stick to a standard wake up time,” they implored. They made the point like this: imagine sleep is a pendulum. One night might be bad, but then the next night swings into the good and then it goes bad and back and forth and back and forth. If you can’t make a bad night better, the best way to stabilize the pendulum might be (sadly) to kill the upswing. Suffer in the short term to improve in the long term.

So that’s what I’ve done. I have been a rock with getting up at 5:00am even if I’m up during the night. I’ve also removed all electronics from my middle of the night waking episodes. CBT-I has a 70-80% success rate and tends to work within a six week time frame. I’m just about two weeks into the practice, so hopefully we shall see results soon.

The doctor also advised I keep track of my sleep with an app: CBT-i coach. It’s free, so if you’re curious about your own sleep – give it a shot.

I’ve got another appointment next Monday. I think the goal of this next session will be to review the data I’ve collected and then prescribe a more detailed sleep program for me. Exciting!

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/27/sleep-consultation/feed/095% Confidence Intervalhttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/15/95-confidence-interval/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/15/95-confidence-interval/#commentsFri, 15 May 2020 12:00:00 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11459Here’s a fun game! Grab a piece of paper and answer these 20 questions as a range with 95% confidence interval.

The questions are crazy out there and will require guessing on most. BUT, again, you’ve gotta guess so that you’re 95% confident that the answer is within your defined range. That means when you’re done you should have exactly 19 of 20 correct.

So if the question was something like:

How many states are there in the United States?

*Note: Pretend you don’t already know the answer.

You’d have to put a range as your answer. so let’s say you said…

12, 60

This means you’re 95% confident there are no fewer than 12 states, and no more than 60.

When it comes time to score, and you see the answer 50… good job! you got that question right! Don’t worry: the answers will be much more ridiculously difficult.

Once you take the test, post your actual % correct confidence interval in the comments.

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/15/95-confidence-interval/feed/2Sleep.https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/12/sleep-3/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/12/sleep-3/#commentsTue, 12 May 2020 11:08:00 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11453I suffer from sleep maintenance insomnia. Or so I am lead to believe by my research into sleep habits. After many years of not realizing I had an issue, I came across a great interview in one of my favorite podcasts, The Drive with Peter Attia, with Matthew Walker sleep guru and writer of the book “Why We Sleep”.

He described in a very straight-forward means that sleep is way more important for our health and well-being than is communicated and the 6 hours or so that’s standard in the American lifestyle is far from sufficient.

How to fix it? Not likely medication but behavioral modifications. I started down this path, but I haven’t been successful enough.

Things I’ve explored:

Darkening the room

Glycine before bed

Sugar and Caffeine reduction

No reading or movies in bed

Meditation

Getting up instead of waiting for sleep

But still it’s been a little rough. However we can’t fix what we can’t measure. So for the past year I’ve been tracking my sleep with a fitbit. Here’s the data so far for 2020:

Not enough sleep

Our Y axis is hours of sleep. The X axis are dates. The blue line is the amount of sleep I got each night in hours. The orange is the total time I was in bed. So, if we look at that very first data point, I had just over 8 hours in bed, and I slept for about 6.5 of those hours.

The amount of time in bed is called your sleep opportunity. Having a sleep efficiency of 85% is pretty normal for someone around age 40. Note: It’s highly age dependent, as you get older your sleep efficiency drops.

Last week I made a major step forward in my quest for sleep – I contacted a sleep doctor. I have my first appointment on Wednesday.

I’m pretty excited. Right now my data shows an average of 6.2 hours of sleep for me per night with an abysmal standard deviation of 2.2 hours. I’m hoping I can adopt new habits that will bring me above 7 hours of sleep per night average. We’ll see how it goes!

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/12/sleep-3/feed/2Pandemic Kombathttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/08/pandemic-kombat/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/08/pandemic-kombat/#respondFri, 08 May 2020 15:08:26 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11292Who’d have thought that 2020’s fashion would be most inspired by subzero and scorpion.
]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/08/pandemic-kombat/feed/0Brushing your teethhttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/06/brushing-your-teeth/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/05/06/brushing-your-teeth/#commentsWed, 06 May 2020 12:11:40 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11286I always thought you were suppose to brush your teeth AFTER breakfast. NAY NAY say the dental wizards. Brush right when you get up… BEFORE breakfast.

The goal is not to clear you teeth of food debris, it’s to rid the mouth of plaque. Nighttime is the perfect plaque environment (less saliva, less swallowing, little tongue movement) so any plaque anchors in your teeth have a field day during those unconscious hours.

I was curious how today’s experiences might relate to the food shortages of WW2. I remember learning about the butter shortage back then that related to the war needs for lubrication oils, but I didn’t know much other than that.

Through an exceedingly brief search of the internet, here’s a collection of some fun facts I learned. I have no education on this matter other than this brief search so if someone can contribute meaningful science/history, I’m all ears.

What we know is true: there are two kinds of shortages:

Those that relate to heightened demand

Those that relate to restricted supply

Back in WW2 they were dealing with both. As noted above, demand for fats like butter were high because the war machine needed lubrication for weapons and vehicles. There were supply issues in WW2 as well. Another contributing factor to the butter/oils shortage was that many of the raw materials for these products originated from countries with whom we were at war.

A non surprising fact is that the shortage spread. According to the book “The Army and Economic Mobilization” by Elberton Smith “the Army found itself presented with applications more and more removed from its direct interests.”

I like a phrase that was referenced in this book: “shortage of capacity.” This included not just the ability to find enough raw materials to make the stuff you want, but also the challenge of logistics. I like this because it seems to nicely describe our current supply network problems. By being optimized for a narrow market, production facilities falter when there’s a hiccup. Dairy farms are dumping milk because they don’t have any means of transitioning from industry milk to consumer milk. Toilet paper is plentiful for business supply – but not for consumer use. These logistical issues on top of the dramatic demand increases for PPE, glass for medical vials, that weird south American tree bark for vaccine research, and the fact that hording will likely grow at both the local and national levels suggest to me that things are gonna get weird.

And not the good weird.

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/30/food-shortages-and-surpluses/feed/2Resourceshttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/resources/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/resources/#respondWed, 22 Apr 2020 16:59:10 +0000http://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11146As you get started with Chess, it’s helpful to be aware of some the best resources for learning. Here are my favorites:

Chess.com – Very well designed site with a decent amount of quality free content. Personally I gravitate towards this site first for general play.

Lichess.org – Lichess is completely free and beginning lessons might be better for nascent players. So this might be a better starting point for those with no chess knowledge whatsoever.

Chessable.com – A highly repetitive (in a good rote sort of way) educating tool for learning chess basics and concepts. As of the moment, I think their website navigation is wanting – but they are a growing site and will likely improve.

If you’re just starting out, check out the “Lessons” section of these sites to learn how the pieces move and the goal of the game. My Dad taught me chess basics when I was a kid, and I toyed with the game through my youth so for me these were mostly review. But it was a good exercise either way.

IMPORTANT FACT FOR NEWBIES: I got a little confused when I first started looking at computer chess because I didn’t know which way the pieces were suppose to go. Like… if it says white to move but it’s showing an endgame where the pieces are all over the place… are my pawns moving up? or down? This is a super simple thing, but it is never explained: Your color is always on the bottom of the screen moving up. The opponent’s color is always moving down. Again, if it says “White to move” then that’s you. And you’re moving Up.

Mobile AppsI have the Chess.com and LiChess apps, but find myself mostly using Chess.com. At one point I tried Magnus trainer, but I think I tried it too late in my education. It might be great for those just starting out, but I found it a little tedious.

One more I really enjoy: Hanging Pawns by StjepanIt’s a chess journey youtube channel dedicated to education. I love the way Stjepan teaches and communicates. He talks through ideas not as tactics but more as strategies. I LOVE THIS.

LiteratureHere’s the problem with chess literature. It takes too much space to show the board after every move, so the authors rely on chess notation for most game presentations. Chess notation is not for the beginner. I’m still terrible at reading it and keeping track of what’s going on. If you want to read books on chess, make sure you read them with a board in front of you that you can use to move the pieces while you’re reading.

My System by Aron NimzowitschThis is really well written for the layperson. It’s accessible and thorough. But again, you can’t read this at a beach. You need to read it at a desk with a chess board.

Fundamental Chess Openings by Paul van der SterrenSo far I’ve only used this as a reference book for the specific games that I’m playing. I wouldn’t recommend this until you naturally realize it’s time to learn opening strategy.

For KidsWe just recently purchased Storytime Chess for our kids. It’s a board game that comes with a story book to explain who the characters are and why they move like they do.

It can be slow at times, but it’s designed appropriately. The intention is you read the story for the piece and then re-read it and play games that just use that one character. It’s pretty good. I recommend it.

Lastly: if you have any chess resources you’d like to recommend, please comment below. I’m always eager to explore

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/resources/feed/0Quarantininghttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/quarantining/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/quarantining/#respondWed, 22 Apr 2020 12:35:25 +0000https://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11182We’re about 40 days into the pandemic Quarantine. It’s a uniquely fascinating time to experience, though admittedly a little scary. We DiDonatos are lucky enough that we have a comfortable place to live in, jobs, a swing set for the little ones, and a netflix subscription.

Our biggest challenges are temporal in nature. Anyone who is taking care of kids right now are feeling the amplification of time. No longer are there plans or activities… just minutes to consume.

Beyond that, our burden is the annoyance associated with a lack of eggs. Oh how convenient it would be to have chickens… it’s times like these that rekindle those dreams of off-grid farmesque living.

Things that keep me up at night:

Maintaining positive cash flow

The abnormal consumption of raw materials and the looming inflation

The tenuous societal balance that seems to be maintaining our social cohesion

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/22/quarantining/feed/0New Stuff.https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/17/new-stuff/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/17/new-stuff/#commentsFri, 17 Apr 2020 14:27:43 +0000http://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11152We did it! The website is fixed… almost. I’ve got the basics up and running, even if there’s some formatting and back end clean up still necessary. Overall, it’s good enough to move forward, so let’s go with it.

For now I’ve decided on three segments. Up top we will have the three most recent blog posts. I’m not going to even pretend that this will be updated daily. But maybe one a week or every other week. Something along those lines.

Next, we will have a monthly photo, likely family related. We’ve got two kids now, Johnny and Ava. I don’t doubt there will be plenty of pictures to keep this area active.

Lastly, I recently got into chess. So I’m playing around with a third segment exclusively about my chess adventures. If you don’t know how to play, or if you’re interested in learning, I intend to walk through my process. Maybe you can tag along! It’s madly fun.

Please feel free to share your thoughts or critiques about the new website design. I’m still educating myself on CSS so I appreciate your patience as this place gets cleaner.

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/17/new-stuff/feed/4Chess, the beginninghttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/16/chess/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/16/chess/#commentsThu, 16 Apr 2020 20:45:13 +0000http://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11137It started with an unassuming statement. While playing a board game with some friends during lunch , a coworker casually dismissed our choice of game, commenting on their proficiency in chess and how we should instead play “a real game”. Irritated by the pretension, I made a pledge to start a long con: I would quietly practice and study chess and when I felt I was ready I would agree to a game and crush him.

That was November of 2018.

And now I’m in. Oh boy, I am so deeply in. Chess has become more than a practice or study, it’s a passion and an obsession. The depth of this game is staggering. I remember in 4th grade I went to my dad with a claim that I had mastered mathematics: “I already know addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. What else could there possibly be?” As I stare up at the Chess learning curve I feel like I did in 1991 when I was exposed to the vast cavern of my own ignorance.

Learning chess isn’t for a destination, it is not to achieve mastery. It is to pursue mastery and that’s what I love about it.

I’ve set up this section of my website to talk about chess. I don’t know if this is a short term thing, or a long term thing. But I like it, so I figured I’d give it a try. Stay tuned for more.

]]>https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/16/chess/feed/2Site Maintenancehttps://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/08/site-maintenance/
https://www.mikedidonato.com/2020/04/08/site-maintenance/#commentsWed, 08 Apr 2020 16:13:10 +0000http://www.mikedidonato.com/?p=11078Oh! Well hello. I didn’t know anyone still came by this corner of the webs.

I’ve decided to give this here website a bit of a make-over. In the process I’ll be trying a few things and most certainly breaking a few things along the way. If formatting and styles seem a bit out of whack, that’s the reason why.